The Laius Complex

Saturn's concept of child-rearing: Goya.

In the 1890s, a revival of Sophocles's ancient play Oedipus Rex held a record-breaking run in Imperial Vienna. Among the many who came to see was a young Dr. Sigmund Freud.

Freud was impressed that a play written over two thousand years earlier could still engross audiences in fin du siecle Europe. He concluded it must speak to something primeval, something hidden in everyone's experience. The rest is history: he coined the term “Oedipus Complex” to refer to the claim that we all, as boys, want to kill our father and sleep with our Mum; or, if we are girls, kill our mother and sleep with Dad. Children are polymorphous perverse about that.

One wonders how the history of the world might have been different if the fashionable play that season had instead been Prometheus Bound, or The Birds.

Lucky Freud did not have to make his living as a literary critic. It is not just that he seized upon a relatively minor and arbitrary bit of Greek mythos, one that never inspired its own cult. He also got the plot wrong. (One therefore wonders how accurate he ever was at dream interpretation). Oedipus himself never had an Oedipus complex. In the play, the last thing he wants to do is kill his father, even abandoning home in hopes that this could thus never happen. When he discovers that he has, despite his best intentions, indeed offed his Pa and slept with Ma, he atones by putting out his own eyes and abandoning his kingship for vagrancy.

To be fair, Freud did realize this. He argued that it did not matter, because although Oedipus did not know he was killing his father, the audience did. Still, he makes a lousy poster boy for the psychological complex as Freud conceives it.

And this is only the half of it. Freud also overlooks the fact that Oedipus's father, Laius, tries hard twice to kill Oedipus. As an infant, long before sweet little Swell-Foot himself is capable of wanting to be guilty of anything, his father pierces his ankles, then binds them together so he cannot crawl away. His mother then abandons him on a mountainside to be devoured by wild beasts. Oddly, this does not seem to Freud worthy of notice—even though the incident defines his hero's very identity: “Oedipus” means “Swell-Foot.”

It is most striking, given this, that Oedipus nevertheless apparently bears no ill will whatsoever to this man who permanently maimed and tried to kill him. Like Freud, he seems to simply not notice the matter, and to draw absolutely no conclusions from it. Sure looks like a case of repression.

Then, when Oedipus kills the unknown Laius at the crossroads, it is in self-defense: Laius strikes the first blow, and Oedipus is outnumbered five to one.

It is, therefore, entirely Laius's actions, in abandoning his child and in picking a fight at the crossroads, that lead to his own death. Oedipus is guilty of nothing.

This is problematic in a Greek tragedy: the downfall of the hero, to be meaningful, is supposed to spring directly from his own actions. He is supposed to have a tragic flaw. There is no apparent tragic flaw in Oedipus, unless an uncompromising commitment to truth and justice is such.

By the rules of classical dramaturgy, this seems to point an accusing finger directly at Laius. He is the real, invisible, protagonist of the play, and Oedipus is simply his victim: the family and the realm, themselves innocent, traditionally fall with the king. After all, Thebes is already under a curse even before Oedipus kills Laius—the curse of the Sphinx. Somebody else has to have brought that on.

Oedipus walking on two legs at midday: Moreau.

To make the matter plain, by the evidence of the Oedipus myth itself, the essential human experience is not the child seeking to kill the parent, but the parent seeking to kill the child. (Or, in the case of the child of the opposite sex, seeking to sleep with him/her). For whatever reason, Freud was standing it all on its head.

Indeed, although there are others, it is not so easy to find examples, in either Greek or in world folklore, of parricide. It is apparently impossible to find examples of unprovoked parricide. If Freud were right, it ought to be everywhere, slipping winkingly out of the subconscious at every chance. Instead, it is the motif of the parent killing the child that is everywhere.

It is, for example, present at the very creation in Greek myth. The cosmos begins with Uranus and Gaea, earth and sky, the primordial pair, doing what grownups do. Gaea becomes pregnant. But Uranus refuses to allow the children to be born. They are trapped in the womb until he is finally castrated, allowing them to emerge.

In the next generation, Uranus's son Cronus/Saturn, more liberal in his views, simply devours each of his children as they emerge from the womb.

The cycle is finally broken with Zeus, for whom a stone is substituted in the Saturnine breakfast, while junior is hidden in a cave.

Surely there is a pattern forming here: if myth is the expression of the subconscious as Freud says it is, then the first, repressed, primordial urge of the parent is to prevent children from being born; or, if they are born, to devour them.

Other Greek myths of child killing include Tantalus, who cooks his son Pelops in a stew to sacrifice to the gods, founding the House of Atreus; Agamemnon, who apparently kills his daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to kick off the expedition to Troy, as well as the Oresteian cycle; Theseus, founder of Athens, fed by his father to the labyrinth and minotaur on Crete in the original version of the Hunger Games; Andromeda, left on a rock by her parents as a meal for a sea monster, saved by the archetypal hero Perseus; Medea, who slaughters her own children for revenge. Note that these events are usually placed, as in the case of Oedipus, at the beginnings of myth or story cycles. It is as if they are to be understood as the underlying cause of what follows. Primeval indeed.

Andromeda bound: Leighton.

Nor is the motif uniquely Greek. Rome was founded by the twins Romulus and Remus, abandoned by their parents but raised instead of eaten by wolves. The Bible offers the troubling story of Abraham, the founder of monotheism, planning to kill his son Isaac. According to the Qur'an, Abraham also abandoned his other son, Ishmael, leaving him in the desert to die. Fortunately, in both cases, God himself intervenes. Isaac instead goes on to found Israel; Ishmael goes on to found Mecca. Moses, giver of the Jewish law, barely escapes infanticide at birth, abandoned by his original parents and raised by a family that seeks the extermination of his entire race. He goes on to lead his people in seizing the land of the Canaanites. And the underlying, unpardonable sin of the Canaanites, which warrants their conquest and annihilation by the Israelites? Their custom of sacrificing their children to Moloch.

Anthropologists agree: infanticide and child murder was par for the course throughout the world before the coming of the great ethical monotheisms, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Anthropologist Laila Williamson, as quoted by Wikipedia: “Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter-gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, ... it has been the rule.” The Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificed children by throwing them into a fire. The Greeks and Romans practiced “exposure,” as in the case of Oedipus, abandoning children on the roadside or mountainside. The Germans left them in the forest. In India, they were thrown into the river. In pre-Christian Russia, they were cast to the dogs. In China, they were drowned in a bucket of water. In Japan, they were smothered with damp paper. The various New World cultures sacrificed the young in various ways. In post-Christian times, we abort.

It was the ethical monotheisms that ended the practice; all three prohibit it. In Europe, infanticide was made illegal in the fourth century, right after the Roman Empire became officially Christian. The ban spread from there where and when Christianity spread. Outside Europe and the Near East, it took European colonialism to end it, in many places as recently as the 19th century.

Remarkably enough, Freud himself discovered the same thing, in his clinical practice. He first found that every single one of his neurotic patients had memories of being sexually molested as young children—the other, opposite-sex half of the Laius complex. Finding the implications of this revelation personally intolerable, he decided it was all false memories and wish fulfillment, reflecting instead a desire by the children to have sex with the parent. Perhaps it was indeed false memory and wish fulfillment: but it still might work either way. Might it not reflect, not the child's own wishes, but their vague impressions of the primordial parental wish to smother or devour?

For this all makes obvious emotional sense. All grownups like sex, and lots of it. Children are to their mind usually a byproduct, and an often unwelcome byproduct. They are not commonly the thing uppermost in one’s mind as one performs the act that produces them. While any Pollyanna might fervently hope that parental instincts will preserve all the little ones in perfect love, this is not spectacularly likely to be the case. Allowed to do so, a significant portion of the population are going to kill their kids outright. We know this: we see the prevalence of abortion today. In the US, abortions are about one quarter of live births, and one quarter of all women have had them.

Among the rest, a significant portion of parents are still going to resent the brat, and might well do what they can, as a result, to make their little life hell.

It is not just that children can cost serenity, time and money. There is a further, perhaps more significant, psychological issue. Children are intimations of our own mortality. Children imply change, change implies death. If we lived forever, there would be no question of children. Looking at them, we also realize our children will probably watch us die, and will live on when we are dead. It is obviously unfair, but not terribly improbable, to resent and envy this fact. This is why, in the Greek myths, the birth of the son is so often made an omen of the father's death: because, by its nature, it is.

Yes, there is a counter-force, a parental instinct in us that seeks to give ourselves for the child. This is likely to be less strong in egos that see themselves as kingly or, like the classical gods, immortal.

Hansel and Gretel abandoned: Kozhin.

While actual child murder presumably grew less frequent once it was outlawed in Christianized Europe, the motif continues in fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel are exposed, Greek style, by their parents. When the first attempt fails, they are exposed again. Out of the envy of the aged for the young, Snow White's wicked “stepmother” repeatedly tries to kill her. Cinderella is cruelly abused by hers. Rapunzel's locks her in a tower. Little Red Riding Hood is almost devoured by some beast claiming to be her grandmother. “The Juniper Tree” highlights both infanticide and cannibalism; as does the original version of “Sleeping Beauty.”

Granted, the perp in these cases is generally not a parent, but a step-parent. That ought to impress the resolutely literal-minded. I suggest this is a polite fiction to keep from frightening little listeners too greatly: as Cinderella's story demonstrated, if the shoe fits, let the parent wear it.

In the meantime, those children who needed to hear it were being warned by these stories of a real danger: that the parent or grandparent who pretends to love you may very well not, in fact, have your interests at heart.

For those who had already experienced consistent abuse, the tales would give hope for a better future, reassure them that their experience did not mean that they themselves were at fault or by nature unlovable, and offer a safer world of the imagination to which to retreat when necessary.

The very fact that the tales have been preserved so lovingly in the popular imagination is good evidence that the experience of child abuse is both common and deeply affecting--just as Freud supposed of the tale of Oedipus Rex.

One might well object that a truly abusive parent would probably not tell their kids these stories. First, they might perceive the implied criticism of themselves; second, even if they did not, why do anything nice for the little monster? But there are in fact subtle hints that the person telling the tale is not a parent, but some “fairy godmother,” who takes an interest in them. Aesop, the original and archetypal children's storyteller, is said to have been a slave—a household servant with access to the children of the great family. So, it seems, are the fictitious “Mother Goose” and “Uncle Remus.” The French upper class tradition that delighted in fairy tales held that the stories were preserved primarily by the servant class; hence in Germany seen by the Brothers Grimm as the “folk tradition.”

In other words, fairy tales were usually veiled warnings from kind outsiders to those trapped in a dysfunctional family. If that dysfunctional family was most often a wealthy one likely to have servants, or little girls who see themselves as princesses, this fits too. Such families are most likely to be led by egos who think of themselves as kingly, godlike, or immortal. These are the egos most likely to resent children.

In all this, Freud was just close enough to the mark to be dangerous. He was right that the origins of “mental illness” usually lie in childhood, and in the family. But they come from a universal repressed desire in parents to harm or have sex with their children, not a repressed desire in children to harm or have sex with the parent. “Mental illnesses” are all forms of what we now call PTSD: children's attempts to survive emotionally and deal with the horror of being for many years under the total control of parents who did not love them and quite possibly wished them dead. And were sometimes prepared to act this out, at least in little ways.

By reversing the valences, Freud told us to do all the wrong things about this. He taught us that we needed to have lots of sex for the sake of our mental health. So much for the welfare of children. He railed against the ethical monotheisms and conventional morality, which kept us from infanticide for so long. He implicitly told us that any hatred for children was justified: they were perverse. They were just as much sexual beings as we were. And they wanted to kill us themselves.

It was the ultimate projection. It was widely embraced in popular culture, because for many if not most of us, it was liberating. It permitted us to ignore our consciences and do whatever we wanted to do instead.

Rapunzel, the original "helicopter child": Anderson.

Things are probably getting worse for the young as a result. Besides abortion, consider, for example, the growing phenomenon of the “helicopter parent.” This is simply the Rapunzel story: the child is allowed no independent existence, but becomes an extension of the parent. With our growing requirements for education, children are also trapped in abusive families for far longer than they once were.

Allen Ginsberg kicked off the phenomenon of the “teenager,” and the Beat Generation, in the Fifties with the poem “Howl,” the central insight of which is that the sacrifice of children to Moloch has been resumed. Vietnam and the draft sharpened that impression. It has not dissipated since. Harry Potter, with its reboot of the motif of the evil step-parents, and Hunger Games, with its reboot of the motif of child sacrifice, have more recently struck that old archetypal chord in the young. Perhaps too, all those zombies and vampires, parts of very old folk tradition, but popular again currently, represent elders who see themselves as immortal. To remain immortal, a vampire must feed on the lifeblood of the young. A zombie simply refuses to die. But if he gets close, he will eat you, just like Saturn would.

And no, government is not a solution. Bad as some parents may be, setting up a government alternative is simply providing enjoyable civil service sinecures for all the worst zombies and vampires.